Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Smith on an inescapable distinction

"American sociology's sacred project nonetheless insists on the 'moral' affirmation of everyone's choices and lifestyle by everyone else in his or her society, an insistence that is mindless and impossible. Personalism distinguishes between those matters about which all humans must be affirmed—or, better, respected, loved, and treated with justice—and those that instead require their being challenged, debated, and sometimes even refused, precisely because they are loved." Christian Smith, "Appendix: The alternative of critical realist personalism," in The sacred project of American sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 202 (199-204). This amounts in the end, of course, to the ancient and unavoidable distinction between loving the sinner and hating his sin.